Following the Path of Life in a Time of Shadows
Scriptures: Psalm 16: 7-11; 1 Peter 1: 3-9
During the Montgomery Bus boycott in 1955, white supremacists set fire to the house of a local
civil rights leader. When the white firefighters arrived, they leaned against their firetruck and
watched the house burn to the ground. Martin Luther King Jr. came and stood beside the man
whose house was burning. Both were helpless to do anything.
The man whose house was burning asked King how he could stick to his nonviolent principles in
the midst of such atrocities. King didn’t answer directly. Instead, speaking slowly as though it
pained him to do so, he quoted from the letter to the Hebrews, chapter 10, verse 39: “But we
do not belong to those who shrink back and are destroyed, but to those who have faith and are
saved.”1 What kind of faith enabled King to say that—not only say it but live it? In a well-known
speech he gave shortly before his was assassinated in 1968, he said:
We are going to win our freedom because both the sacred heritage of our nation and the
eternal will of the Almighty God are embodied in our echoing demands. So however
difficult it is during this period, however difficult it is to continue to live with the agony
and the continued existence of racism, however difficult it is to live amidst the constant
hurt, the constant insult and the constant disrespect, I can still sing we shall overcome.
We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards
justice.
We shall overcome because Carlisle is right. "No lie can live forever." We shall overcome
because William Cullen Bryant is right. "Truth crushed to earth will rise again." We shall
overcome because James Russell Lowell is right. "Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong
forever on the throne." Yet that scaffold sways the future. We shall overcome because
the Bible is right. "You shall reap what you sow."
With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope. . .
With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when all of God's children all over this
nation - black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics will be
able to join hands and sing in the words of the old negro spiritual, "Free at Last, Free at
Last, Thank God Almighty, We are Free at Last."2
I was a child during the civil rights era and most of it was distant and even unknown to me and
the community where grew up in rural Pennsylvania. Yes, we had our own prejudices. I now
realize that we were not as aware of them as we should have been and, therefore, allowed
them to shape our lives in hurtful ways. Later, when I moved to Virginia as an adult, I heard civil
rights stories from people a generation older than me in our Sunday school class. One man
talked about participating in a civil rights march. Others recalled that public schools in Virginia
had been closed in defiance of the Supreme Court desegregation order.
1
I thought of it as a dark period in our history that we had transcended. We have made lots of
progress since then; yet, we still have so far to go to realize King’s dream. And, in other areas,
we’re actually losing ground in our country and around the world. Recalling recent civil rights
atrocities and hate speech from some political and religious leaders, Ayanna Johnson Watkins
writes:
These collective experiences take their toll. I feel it in my body and soul: a sadness, a pain,
a loss, a reopening of scarred places. And I hear it in the words of my neighbors: a sense
of tragic loss, helplessness, fear, and anger. Those of us who count ourselves as people of
faith have the challenge of maintaining this identity while also managing all these feelings.
We stand and stare at the burning places, wondering if we chose the right team.
The challenge, as the title of this sermon indicates, is to follow the path of life in a time of
shadows. Psalm 16 speaks about taking refuge in God. In verse 7 we read, “I bless the Lord who
gives me counsel; in the night also my heart instructs me.” This is key! We develop a sensitive,
guiding conscience through our meditation on God’s word and our experience of God and
God’s love in our lives.
This becomes our guide in a world of lies and power politics. The psalmist speaks of that kind of
world as Sheol—a place of shadows and death. We should not only think of this as physical
death. The lives of violent people who exploit others become hollowed out long before they
die. They keep seeking prosperity and happiness in ways that are destructive to themselves and
everyone else.
Last week we celebrated Easter Sunday. Jesus’ resurrection is connected to the life he lived,
leading to his death on a Roman cross. It’s also connected to Christ alive in our world. In the
end, God’s love always wins! That’s what Martin Luther King Jr. understood so well. No, we’re
not on the wrong team even though it can at times feel like it. Listen to the last stanza of our
opening hymn this morning:
Christ is alive! His Spirit burns through this and every future age,
till all creation lives and learns his joy, his justice, love, and praise.
This is what the writer of 1 Peter understands so well. He ties all this into what he calls our
“new birth into a living hope.” I love that phrase! Jesus’ resurrection is not only something that
happened two thousand years ago. That path of life is right here in our time in the midst of the
lies, shadows, and death that feed our daily news cycles and all the ugly commentary we hear
on mass media.
Living in the resurrection gives us a different center and keeps us from being sucked in by all
that stuff. According to 1 Peter, the light, the life, and the love of God that shone in and
through the life and passion of Jesus, are real, true, and enduring. It’s an inheritance that’s
imperishable, undefiled, and unfading.
2
This is in contrast to the fleeting popularity and power inherent in our human systems, which
are generally shot through with pride, violence, and injustice. The differences are obvious. Even
so, I don’t want to paint everything in our human structures, including our government, with
dark colors. There’s much good and sometimes we see signs of God’s kingdom emerge in places
that rarely make the news.
This week I participated in the Fairfax County Food Council steering committee meeting. I serve
on it as a representative of the Clergy and Leadership Council. The work that the Food Council
and related agencies do is largely unrecognized by most people. Together, we try to make sure
that desperate people in our area can at least find food to eat. Beyond that, we have programs
in food literacy and in community gardening or urban agriculture. Cory Suter attended our
meeting as the new co-chair of the urban agriculture working group. They’re doing some
exciting things in promoting small-scale urban agriculture, community gardening, and edible
landscaping.
I was very pleased to see our small church represented in this way in these efforts. Despite such
wonderful exceptions, world systems through the ages generally have been and still are the
opposite. Franciscan priest Richard Rohr says this is why the most Jesus hoped for is that his
group become a “little flock.”
Today we call it “critical mass.” The Gospels call it “the Twelve.” Jesus calls it “leven,” or
“yeast.” He seems to have the patience and humility to trust a slow, leavening process.
This is quite different from any notion of empire or “Christendom,” which always relies
upon the use of [coercive] power.3
And that, my friends, is why our name is Daniels Run Peace Church and why we adopted the
motto, “Living Love, Growing Justice, Welcoming Everyone.” Jesus called it the “reign of God”
as opposed to the “reign of Caesar.” The writer of 1 Peter called it a “new birth into a living
hope. In the book of James, it’s called “the perfect law, the law of liberty. Martin Luther King Jr.
called it the “beloved community.” I sometimes call it “God’s new world coming.”
We’ll always be a little flock because such love, such compassion, such justice, and such liberty
are downright scary to those who identify with the structural status-quo in our world. At best,
we’re tolerated and ignored. If we become too much of a threat, they’ll actively oppose our
“little flock.” That’s why the writer of 1 Peter talks about rejoicing even when we suffer various
trials. This is what that civil rights leader in Montgomery experienced when his house was
torched. This proves the genuineness of our faith, which like gold has been tested and purified
by fire.
But this is not about doom and gloom. It’s the exact opposite. The writer of I Peter calls our
new birth an “indescribable and glorious joy.” It’s so joyous because the outcome is the “saving
of our souls.” Sometimes such religious language gets in our way because of our narrow
understanding of things like “new birth” “soul” and being “saved.” It might be more
3
understandable if we instead say that our inner being is being transformed into the very life of
God as seen in Jesus and empowered by the Spirit. That’s our living hope.
1
Ayanna Johnson Watkins, “Living by the Word,” The Christian Century (March 24, 2017).
http://www.gphistorical.org/mlk/mlkspeech/index.htm
3
Richard Rohr, The Divine Dance (London: SPCK, 2016), 65.
2
4